Virtual Reality
Immersive shopping experiences
Artificial Intelligence
Shopping experience tailored to the user's profile
Associated plans
Leisure/cultural offers around collection points
Experience a new dimension of shopping
Explore, personalize, and scrutinize products to your heart's content
The past decade has seen a significant transformation in e-commerce, driven by the ubiquity of mobile phones, easy internet access, and societal digital literacy. This rapid progress has reshaped the commercial landscape and opened new sales avenues, but also poses challenges for small businesses with lower levels of digitization, who struggle to adapt and compete amid evolving consumer expectations and ongoing sector innovation.
Emerging technologies like Virtual Reality (VR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are propelling e-commerce into a new era, offering substantial advantages such as an in-person-like shopping experience and the ability to present highly customized products to individual consumers. However, the adoption of these technologies requires significant investment in advanced technological resources and skilled personnel. This circumstance largely benefits major international companies, consequently widening the gap between them and small businesses.
This growing disparity not only exacerbates existing inequalities but also leads to serious consequences such as gradual closure of small businesses, detrimental effects on local economies, depopulation phenomena, and erosion of community cultural identities. The closure of these businesses would imply the loss of products intrinsically tied to the cultural roots of a place, affecting not only the economy but also the culture and heritage.
Our Proposal
In response to these challenges, there’s an urgent need to find solutions that narrow this gap, improve small business competitiveness, and strengthen local economies. To enhance this competitiveness, a leap in evolution is needed to bring small businesses to a commercial situation closer to future years, to avoid constantly being technologically lagged. Our proposition is VR-ZOCO, a VR and AI-based e-commerce platform enabling small businesses to display their products, overcoming physical store limitations, while considering their limited resources (material, human, and technological).
VR-ZOCO benefits customers by enabling them to examine products from home similarly to how they would in-person. Furthermore, it gamifies the shopping experience, making it more entertaining and providing the chance to earn discounts. For sellers, VR-ZOCO offers an innovative platform that allows them to showcase their products, overcoming physical store limitations. It also promotes collaboration among merchants, enabling the formation of cooperatives to strengthen their positions and offer more competitive prices. VR-ZOCO allows not only the sale of common products available on other platforms but also those distinguishing local businesses: culturally rooted and second-hand items, whose condition can be appreciated through a VR headset.
The benefit also extends to the entire city. VR-ZOCO allows the option to purchase online and pick up the product in-store. The system, using AI techniques, can formulate leisure and cultural plans near the pickup location, thereby incentivizing consumer flow and revitalizing local economies. This favors a triple cause: it reduces the disappearance of businesses, combats depopulation phenomena, and contributes to pollution reduction by minimizing the number of trips for product delivery and generation of packaging waste.
Synergy between commerce and the city boosting the local economy
Shop remotely if you wish, with an experience similar to a physical store. Pick Up and Connect with Your City
The purchase of products in VR-ZOCO includes cultural leisure plans with offers associated with places near the pickup points
The customer can pick up the purchased product at local collection points located within the community. The system, using AI techniques, generates plans for leisure/cultural offers near the pick-up point. This proposal aims to establish strong connections between the sales outlets and the rest of the attractions the city offers, thereby boosting the local economy.
What they think of the project
Industry Partners
